6 ms·

I don't want to talk about vaccines anymore. Whatever study people have to cherry pick or whatever beliefs you may hold, whatever your stance is, most people ha

I don't want to talk about vaccines anymore. Whatever study people have to cherry pick or whatever beliefs you may hold, whatever your stance is, most people have made the decision on whether or not to be vaccinated. What I wish we focused on instead, is the medical system as a whole. We've been hearing stories everyday about how hospitals are on the brink of collapse. Why, in 2 years of this pandemic, have we not devoted the resources to expanding bed capacity and staffing hospitals? Why is testing still so unsustainable? From day 1 of the pandemic, from social distancing, to masking, to now getting vaccinated, the messaging has been do all of these things to avoid overwhelming the hospitals so it seems weird to me that 2 years later the messaging is exactly the same.

BobbyJo 5y ago
We aren't short on 'resources', we are short on doctors and nurses. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at things, the number of doctors isn't going to change drastically. You can pay them 10x and the number won't change. We only have so many medical schools, and so many people willing to throw themselves on the sword to get through them. Nurses are a little more flexible in that more money might mean more nurses, but only up to a point. In either case, throwing a ton more people into a long term career to deal with a short term problem (I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years that they do for the next wave) will cause other problems down the road.
- kalstone 5y ago
  It also did not help to have mass firings of doctors and nurses just as the new variant rolled in
- 01100011 5y ago
  > It doesn't matter how much money you throw at things, the number of doctors isn't going to change drastically. I don't think that's true. If being a doctor had the same work:pay ratio as being a SW dev I think you'd have more smart people choosing that career. Health regulations and extra procedures certainly helped to discourage employment as well, but I think pay would help. > I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years The baby boomers are just starting to enter their mid 70s. Sure, it may not reach COVID-surge levels, but they are going to need a lot of health care.
  - perardi 5y ago
    > If being a doctor had the same work:pay ratio as being a SW dev I think you'd have more smart people choosing that career. Health regulations and extra procedures certainly helped to discourage employment as well, but I think pay would help. I just have the compulsive need as the son of a nurse, who is now dating a nurse: nurses could use the monetary incentive, too. And I have to feel the vast amount of regulatory paperwork doctors (and other medical providers) have to go through is a constant nagging discouragement. I mean, I think that evolved for good reasons, to help create accountability to to ease care when the patient enters a different part of the system, but holy crap, it’s a lot of forms to fill out as a medical care worker.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    > If being a doctor had the same work:pay ratio as being a SW dev 1) No matter how much the pay goes up for doctors, medical schools are still only going to have so much capacity, capacity which is artificially constrained. We are already at a place where many more people that are highly competent and intelligent want to be doctors than are actually able to become doctors simply because of medical school bandwidth. 2) Work:Pay ratio is already higher depending on the kind of medicine you do, but even lower pay programs still have no problem filling up. The issue in the US clearly is not incentive, it's the obstacles, both administrative and personal. I could go on a rant about not every doctor needing to be the best and brightest, but that'd be off topic. > The baby boomers are just starting to enter their mid 70s. Sure, it may not reach COVID-surge levels, but they are going to need a lot of health care. Seeing as how that's near the end of life expectancy, demand for care should actually start to fall in the near future. Maybe it increases slightly short term, but we'll be on the other side of that in less than 10 years.
- BoysenberryPi 5y ago
  > We aren't short on 'resources', we are short on doctors and nurses. When I say "resources", people are included in that. Human resources one might call it. > Nurses are a little more flexible in that more money might mean more nurses, but only up to a point. In either case, throwing a ton more people into a long term career to deal with a short term problem (I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years that they do for the next wave) will cause other problems down the road. I understand what you mean but I think you greatly underestimate how many nurses work contract and are not employed by hospitals. Almost all nurses I know, and I know quite a few, are all working as contractors for agencies. The hospital assignments are just almost never worth it.
01100011 5y ago
My wife is trying to become a nurse. Thanks to COVID screwing up her school schedule she's at least a year behind. She's currently working as a residential assistant at rather nice elderly care facility where they are short staffed. She makes about what she would make at a fast food restaurant despite working in a semi-skilled position(requires CNA credentials) and working with COVID positive residents. They are just now discussing possible pay raises. The pandemic experience is likely to push people out of health care and result in even less people choosing it as a career unless compensation and the workload changes. This comes just as the baby boomers are reaching an age when they'll start to need serious care.
- iqanq 5y ago
  Then salaries need to increase.
  - yazaddaruvala 5y ago
    I agree they should increase, but who would be paying for the increase? The elderly who are already retied and likely have a fixed monthly expenditure?
    - adamrezich 5y ago
      idk it seems like the healthcare industry as a whole made bank off this whole thing, if they want to help prove it wasn't largely a massive cash grab for the people at the top, then surely they'll reinvest their profits back into salaries to solve understaffing issues?
      - yazaddaruvala 5y ago
        Elderly care isn’t really the same as the health care industry. I don’t know the nuances well so I might be wrong about this. Meanwhile, even for increasing salaries for nurses in the health care industry, in the USA the improved image has to have a positive profit-based motivation.
    - 5y ago
spookthesunset 5y ago
If the virus is endemic, what even is the point of all this testing? What does is accomplish besides telling you “yup, this test says you have a virus”? I never got tested for respiratory viruses before when I got sick. Why this one? We cannot move on until we eliminate all this mass testing. Yes test for confirmation before administering something specific to Covid but testing somebody whose only medical issue is something that can be bought over the counter… what is the point? All this testing is just causing chaos in peoples lives.
- standardUser 5y ago
  Testing is so you know if you have COVID and you don't go and spread it. And the reason you don't go and spread it is because hospitals have limited capacity - and healthcare workers haver limited energy - so we want to avoid people dying due to lack of proper medical care. This has been the entire point of mitigation efforts from day one.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    So why aren’t we testing for the cold and the flu? Those are just as endemic as Covid and they mutate every year too. Why test specifically for Covid? What useful information does knowing you have Covid instead of the myriad of other respiratory viruses actually provide? The treatment for all of them is gonna be basically the same for like 99% of all cases.
    - standardUser 5y ago
      If we know we have Covid we can avoid spreading it, and we avoid spreading it because it threatens our healthcare capacity. That is why we test. The common cold and flu do not spread nearly as easily and don't result in such frequent hospitalization. Yes, taking extra mitigation efforts to prevent the spread of the flu, such as widespread testing, may spare us a few hospital beds. But the return on investment is very low. With Covid, it is very high, since each case of Covid stands to spread more readily than a case of the flu, and each case is more likely to result in hospitalization. It's the hospitalizations that matter ultimately, the same now as when the pandemic began, and all mitigation efforts serve that end.
nafix 5y ago
Thank you. I've also been trying to get this across to other people as well. And here's the worst part. If and when another high-spread virus emerges in the future, there will not be a vaccine available at the beginning, which is also when hospital overwhelming is most critical. So we will be in the exact same situation. I can't believe no one is talking about improving the hospital infrastructure to handle the inevitable next virus. Are there things happening in this regard and I am just out of the loop?
- daveoc64 5y ago
  Having enough excess capacity in healthcare systems to cope with potential future pandemics is too expensive. You'd need a lot more medical staff, plus more equipment and hospital bed capacity. There would be a perception for a lot of the time that the cost of all of these things is wasteful - whether you're talking about public or private healthcare. Not being able to say when the next pandemic might occur is going to make it a hard sell - how do you tell taxpayers or shareholders that you need to keep extra staff on retainer for something that may not happen for 100 years? If you put these extra staff to use on other types of (non-essential) healthcare, then you're going to have to cancel all of that when the next pandemic happens. That will then lead to backlogs as operations are cancelled, screening isn't carried out etc. - and you're back to healthcare having to shut down. Also, what do you plan for? Not every pandemic is the same.
honkycat 5y ago
> Why, in 2 years of this pandemic, have we not devoted the resources to expanding bed capacity and staffing hospitals? When have we ( assuming you are US, forgive me ) ever devoted resources to anything other than the military industrial complex and tax-cuts for the rich? We don't HAVE resources. We have already scraped out every piece of public spending and public works program out of our budgets. You expect us to be able to just scale back up after systematically disassembling our university[0] and medical systems over the past 30 years? OK, we increase capacity. We save a few people, so what? We are running a BUSINESS HERE. We can't have any extra capacity, that would cut into profits! Plus we are still low after paying $600 per insulin shot last month. Besides, haven't you heard? Everyone made a killing off the pandemic! It was great for business! BCBS posted 2 billion in profit last year! Don't worry your little head: Our healthcare and technology CEOs didn't have to sell their private jets or wait on buying that new yacht they have been eyeing. This is what neoliberalism looks like. Every drop of blood drained out of public spending, so we can reroute it to whoever gives our senators the largest bribe. 0: Which creates professionals upon which US healthcare depends
base698 5y ago
And $10 trillion dollars.
jamps 5y ago
I think it is great that omicron can propagate like this. The severity seems to be quite low. That means that everybody will be immune and we can move on. We should remove as well those mask and vaccine coercion, but I don't think that will happen. I personally look at the raw data of death. I believe that most data you would get around COVID have bias, and only overall data speak the truth. Look at what happened in Europe: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps (This does not include hospitalizations) First of, you realize that the pandemic is not at all what we have been told. We can observe an increase in death in the winters, but somewhere like peaks with 10% more deaths than the years beforehand. You realize that for the 0-44 age group, there has been NO PANDEMIC. So from the beginning, we should just let this age group live normally. (no mask, no restrictions, no mandatory vaccine, no pass, no isolation) Then comes the other age groups > 44, that did have excess death especially during winters. We should focus on the care to them and allow them to have a better access to their doctor, even when positive. Equip all of them with early treatment pack (antiviral and antibiotics for the first phase, anticoagulant and anti-inflammatory for the second). Provide them access to vaccines, only if they want to take them as it is an experimental treatment. The main reason why the hospitals got over populated is because we told people to isolate and not see their doctors. They wait to be really sick and have no choice than going to the hospital. Then come the health structure. We should just double the wages of all the nurses, auxiliary, GP, emergency doctors. Allow quick formations for unemployed and military to become auxiliary. And if you think we cannot pay for that, think about the cost of a single day of nation wide lockdown.

BobbyJo 5y ago

We aren't short on 'resources', we are short on doctors and nurses. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at things, the number of doctors isn't going to change drastically. You can pay them 10x and the number won't change. We only have so many medical schools, and so many people willing to throw themselves on the sword to get through them. Nurses are a little more flexible in that more money might mean more nurses, but only up to a point. In either case, throwing a ton more people into a long term career to deal with a short term problem (I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years that they do for the next wave) will cause other problems down the road.

kalstone 5y ago
It also did not help to have mass firings of doctors and nurses just as the new variant rolled in
01100011 5y ago
> It doesn't matter how much money you throw at things, the number of doctors isn't going to change drastically. I don't think that's true. If being a doctor had the same work:pay ratio as being a SW dev I think you'd have more smart people choosing that career. Health regulations and extra procedures certainly helped to discourage employment as well, but I think pay would help. > I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years The baby boomers are just starting to enter their mid 70s. Sure, it may not reach COVID-surge levels, but they are going to need a lot of health care.
- perardi 5y ago
  > If being a doctor had the same work:pay ratio as being a SW dev I think you'd have more smart people choosing that career. Health regulations and extra procedures certainly helped to discourage employment as well, but I think pay would help. I just have the compulsive need as the son of a nurse, who is now dating a nurse: nurses could use the monetary incentive, too. And I have to feel the vast amount of regulatory paperwork doctors (and other medical providers) have to go through is a constant nagging discouragement. I mean, I think that evolved for good reasons, to help create accountability to to ease care when the patient enters a different part of the system, but holy crap, it’s a lot of forms to fill out as a medical care worker.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  > If being a doctor had the same work:pay ratio as being a SW dev 1) No matter how much the pay goes up for doctors, medical schools are still only going to have so much capacity, capacity which is artificially constrained. We are already at a place where many more people that are highly competent and intelligent want to be doctors than are actually able to become doctors simply because of medical school bandwidth. 2) Work:Pay ratio is already higher depending on the kind of medicine you do, but even lower pay programs still have no problem filling up. The issue in the US clearly is not incentive, it's the obstacles, both administrative and personal. I could go on a rant about not every doctor needing to be the best and brightest, but that'd be off topic. > The baby boomers are just starting to enter their mid 70s. Sure, it may not reach COVID-surge levels, but they are going to need a lot of health care. Seeing as how that's near the end of life expectancy, demand for care should actually start to fall in the near future. Maybe it increases slightly short term, but we'll be on the other side of that in less than 10 years.
BoysenberryPi 5y ago
> We aren't short on 'resources', we are short on doctors and nurses. When I say "resources", people are included in that. Human resources one might call it. > Nurses are a little more flexible in that more money might mean more nurses, but only up to a point. In either case, throwing a ton more people into a long term career to deal with a short term problem (I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years that they do for the next wave) will cause other problems down the road. I understand what you mean but I think you greatly underestimate how many nurses work contract and are not employed by hospitals. Almost all nurses I know, and I know quite a few, are all working as contractors for agencies. The hospital assignments are just almost never worth it.

01100011 5y ago

My wife is trying to become a nurse. Thanks to COVID screwing up her school schedule she's at least a year behind. She's currently working as a residential assistant at rather nice elderly care facility where they are short staffed. She makes about what she would make at a fast food restaurant despite working in a semi-skilled position(requires CNA credentials) and working with COVID positive residents. They are just now discussing possible pay raises. The pandemic experience is likely to push people out of health care and result in even less people choosing it as a career unless compensation and the workload changes. This comes just as the baby boomers are reaching an age when they'll start to need serious care.

iqanq 5y ago
Then salaries need to increase.
- yazaddaruvala 5y ago
  I agree they should increase, but who would be paying for the increase? The elderly who are already retied and likely have a fixed monthly expenditure?
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    idk it seems like the healthcare industry as a whole made bank off this whole thing, if they want to help prove it wasn't largely a massive cash grab for the people at the top, then surely they'll reinvest their profits back into salaries to solve understaffing issues?
    - yazaddaruvala 5y ago
      Elderly care isn’t really the same as the health care industry. I don’t know the nuances well so I might be wrong about this. Meanwhile, even for increasing salaries for nurses in the health care industry, in the USA the improved image has to have a positive profit-based motivation.
  - 5y ago

spookthesunset 5y ago

If the virus is endemic, what even is the point of all this testing? What does is accomplish besides telling you “yup, this test says you have a virus”? I never got tested for respiratory viruses before when I got sick. Why this one? We cannot move on until we eliminate all this mass testing. Yes test for confirmation before administering something specific to Covid but testing somebody whose only medical issue is something that can be bought over the counter… what is the point? All this testing is just causing chaos in peoples lives.

standardUser 5y ago
Testing is so you know if you have COVID and you don't go and spread it. And the reason you don't go and spread it is because hospitals have limited capacity - and healthcare workers haver limited energy - so we want to avoid people dying due to lack of proper medical care. This has been the entire point of mitigation efforts from day one.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  So why aren’t we testing for the cold and the flu? Those are just as endemic as Covid and they mutate every year too. Why test specifically for Covid? What useful information does knowing you have Covid instead of the myriad of other respiratory viruses actually provide? The treatment for all of them is gonna be basically the same for like 99% of all cases.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    If we know we have Covid we can avoid spreading it, and we avoid spreading it because it threatens our healthcare capacity. That is why we test. The common cold and flu do not spread nearly as easily and don't result in such frequent hospitalization. Yes, taking extra mitigation efforts to prevent the spread of the flu, such as widespread testing, may spare us a few hospital beds. But the return on investment is very low. With Covid, it is very high, since each case of Covid stands to spread more readily than a case of the flu, and each case is more likely to result in hospitalization. It's the hospitalizations that matter ultimately, the same now as when the pandemic began, and all mitigation efforts serve that end.

nafix 5y ago

Thank you. I've also been trying to get this across to other people as well. And here's the worst part. If and when another high-spread virus emerges in the future, there will not be a vaccine available at the beginning, which is also when hospital overwhelming is most critical. So we will be in the exact same situation. I can't believe no one is talking about improving the hospital infrastructure to handle the inevitable next virus. Are there things happening in this regard and I am just out of the loop?

daveoc64 5y ago
Having enough excess capacity in healthcare systems to cope with potential future pandemics is too expensive. You'd need a lot more medical staff, plus more equipment and hospital bed capacity. There would be a perception for a lot of the time that the cost of all of these things is wasteful - whether you're talking about public or private healthcare. Not being able to say when the next pandemic might occur is going to make it a hard sell - how do you tell taxpayers or shareholders that you need to keep extra staff on retainer for something that may not happen for 100 years? If you put these extra staff to use on other types of (non-essential) healthcare, then you're going to have to cancel all of that when the next pandemic happens. That will then lead to backlogs as operations are cancelled, screening isn't carried out etc. - and you're back to healthcare having to shut down. Also, what do you plan for? Not every pandemic is the same.

honkycat 5y ago

> Why, in 2 years of this pandemic, have we not devoted the resources to expanding bed capacity and staffing hospitals? When have we ( assuming you are US, forgive me ) ever devoted resources to anything other than the military industrial complex and tax-cuts for the rich? We don't HAVE resources. We have already scraped out every piece of public spending and public works program out of our budgets. You expect us to be able to just scale back up after systematically disassembling our university[0] and medical systems over the past 30 years? OK, we increase capacity. We save a few people, so what? We are running a BUSINESS HERE. We can't have any extra capacity, that would cut into profits! Plus we are still low after paying $600 per insulin shot last month. Besides, haven't you heard? Everyone made a killing off the pandemic! It was great for business! BCBS posted 2 billion in profit last year! Don't worry your little head: Our healthcare and technology CEOs didn't have to sell their private jets or wait on buying that new yacht they have been eyeing. This is what neoliberalism looks like. Every drop of blood drained out of public spending, so we can reroute it to whoever gives our senators the largest bribe. 0: Which creates professionals upon which US healthcare depends

base698 5y ago

And $10 trillion dollars.

jamps 5y ago

I think it is great that omicron can propagate like this. The severity seems to be quite low. That means that everybody will be immune and we can move on. We should remove as well those mask and vaccine coercion, but I don't think that will happen. I personally look at the raw data of death. I believe that most data you would get around COVID have bias, and only overall data speak the truth. Look at what happened in Europe: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps (This does not include hospitalizations) First of, you realize that the pandemic is not at all what we have been told. We can observe an increase in death in the winters, but somewhere like peaks with 10% more deaths than the years beforehand. You realize that for the 0-44 age group, there has been NO PANDEMIC. So from the beginning, we should just let this age group live normally. (no mask, no restrictions, no mandatory vaccine, no pass, no isolation) Then comes the other age groups > 44, that did have excess death especially during winters. We should focus on the care to them and allow them to have a better access to their doctor, even when positive. Equip all of them with early treatment pack (antiviral and antibiotics for the first phase, anticoagulant and anti-inflammatory for the second). Provide them access to vaccines, only if they want to take them as it is an experimental treatment. The main reason why the hospitals got over populated is because we told people to isolate and not see their doctors. They wait to be really sick and have no choice than going to the hospital. Then come the health structure. We should just double the wages of all the nurses, auxiliary, GP, emergency doctors. Allow quick formations for unemployed and military to become auxiliary. And if you think we cannot pay for that, think about the cost of a single day of nation wide lockdown.